Wednesday, May 02, 2012

A recent installment of New York Times' Lensblog features Benjamin Lowy's use of Hipstamatic as a journalistic tool. On his Tumblr page he states that "To 'point and shoot' has been a liberating experience. It has allowed me
to rediscover the excitement of seeing imperfections and happy
accidents rendered through the lens of my handheld device." Imperfections and accidents are indeed wonderful, and I think Lowy is absolutely right to emphasize the liberating power of this tool and its happy results. It seems obvious to me that the cell phone would be a useful
journalistic tool as well as boon to street photographers because it is
discrete, small and light, and can transmit images instantly. So what's not to like?

It's the apps and the manipulations that provoke mistrust,
but as Lowy argues there is not much difference really between applying a
certain filter and choosing a Holga format over another. And Lowy is not the only one to point
this out; Teru Kuwayama is another cogent defender of the app and he and his
crew have used it to great effect for his Basetrack project, images from which were featured in a spread in Foreign Policy magazine.

But I disagree with the emphasis that Lowy places on the
drive to make images look "different enough, peculiar enough" so as
to grab the reader's attention. In
an interview he gave at the New York Photo Festival he stated, “So much work is out there . . . you have to
stop them in their tracks [through
creating] interesting visual narratives. . . . If you can attract someone
because it looks different enough, I think that’s our job, as visual
communicators.”

Certainly anyone involved in an aesthetic practice --
anything tied to perception and communication -- is looking to innovate, to
experiment with the form. That is
a given. But this emphasis on the
need to look different in order to attract attention and somehow correct the
effects of so called image fatigue begs questions about the nature of image-based reportage, its status within the news industry, and the qualities that
make it meaningful, which are not solely a matter of achieving a
"different look."

One has to ask, would Foreign Policy have published the work
of the Basetrack photographers had it not been for the fact that they used
Hipstamatic, and by framing the article in terms of the novelty of the form,
does the spread exist to inform us about the realities of Afghanistan and help
us to understand it better?Or is
that merely a side effect?It’s a
little odd and disheartening to think that such an extensive spread, a rare
thing these days, was made possible because the use of Hipstamatic was deemed
newsworthy enough to merit this treatment, while reportage on Afghanistan (or
any other crisis) would never in and of itself be given so many pages.The title says it all: "The War in
Hipstamatic: A rare and beautiful look at Afghanistan, through an
iPhone."The emphasis is on
rare beauty, not war, not the Afghans, not American policy.Imagine a similar spread in Life during
WWII, “Leica Cameras Bring You War in the European Theater”; or in the 60s,
"Young Turks Shoot Khe Sanh in Color!”It would appear that Lowy was right, that “different
imagery” will, at least, compel the editors to pay attention.And the readers appear to have been
moved – to comment on the “nice pics,” that is.One reader commented, “Great pics. It's pics like these that
capture the essence of the environment. I can't seem to get good pics like
these with my iPhone especially when it's dark.”Is this Foreign Policy magazine or Popular Photography?The novelty of the approach trumped the
gravity of the war.But it’s something
of a Pyrrhic victory after all.

It's the emphasis on style that makes me hesitate, as if it
were all about finding some visual quirk that lends distinction to the
photograph. Dashiell Hammett once
said, "I stopped writing because I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you
discover you have style."
Rather than style, I would emphasize the need for "vision,"
which is a very different thing and not entirely visual. A
photographer with vision may not have a radically "peculiar" style,
but there will be plenty of force
and meaning and weight because the images are grounded in an original point of
view, a narrative that is more than just a neat way to tell a story, because
the themes provide a more substantial way of thinking about the world and any
particular issue.

I personally think that viewer apathy is less of a problem
than the current structure of the media and its relegation of imagery to the
status of illustration. The more
inventive the image, the more it conforms to the canon of artistic illustration,
so much so that in news magazines illustrations are often used interchangeably
with photos. It is not just that
the photojournalist today has to
contend with the fact that "there is so much work out there," it's
that the work has lost its status and has to compete with a sea of photoshopped
illustrative material. And the
reason for this lies in the shift in the economy of the magazine and newspaper
business as far back as the 70s and 80s.
The average news consumer no longer relies on photo essays to obtain
information about the world, as they once did when Gene Smith was publishing
essays in Life. Slideshows are sideshows.

As a result photojournalists have reacted by cultivating
novel perspectives and advocating what is variously called experiential or
subjective documentary, as a means of distinguishing their work and their
perspective from the run of ordinary imagery based on older concepts of
objectivity and what is felt to be a prosaic grasp of reality. Great work has been done in this vein,
but the insistence on "subjectivity" is a kind of gloss over an
essential anxiety about the value of the photographic image.

It's not about "challenging old
perspectives," as Lensblog states in a paraphrase of Kathy Ryan's defense of Hipstamatic imagery. In fact Ryan argued that the editors were trying to decide between two sets of images provided by Lowy, one set from a DSLR and one Hipstamatic set, the latter of which was believed to be "more exciting and dynamic; the rich palette and high contrast
brought clarity and texture and even poetry to the scenes." The choice between these specific sets of images does not imply a larger challenge to old perspectives, or that other such perspectives are now passé. That way lies
pure formalism, which is the same thing that has bedeviled Modern Art in the
20th century -- an insistence on formal revolution degrades art to a mere
craving for novelty. It's about
having something to say that is worth hearing (or seeing). To some extent this involves formal
innovation, but that is just part of endeavor and if we overemphasize its role
and frantically churn out visually different imagery for the mere sake of
difference, we lose sight of other aesthetic virtues that are not purely formal
or technical.

Besides, it's a battle you cannot win. Already we are deluged by little
green-shifted squares of light with funky borders because everyone is a
photographer these days and everyone is gleefully filtering their Kodak
moments. One of the things I found
so compelling about Lowy's book Iraq Perspectives (published by Duke University, the oracle of Academic Hip) is that the perspective arose
from the specific circumstances of being in Iraq -- he conveys what it is like
to live in a world that must be seen from inside a Humvee because normal human
relationships are impossible during war.
Instead of connection there is alienation and misunderstanding. It is a brilliant idea. This is very different from the
arbitrary application of any number of filters and it is not a mere stylistic
choice. This kind of vision comes
only from a grasp of immediate and specific circumstances, an engagement not
with your tools and filters but with the world in a unique and momentary guise.

Jon on the Web

“Immerse yourself in a picture long enough and you will realize how alive the contradictions are: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of accident, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”

On Intention

"I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse."
Diane Arbus

"A photograph is a moral decision taken in one-eighth of a second."
Salman Rushdie

"If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time."
Robert Doisneau

"Sometimes you have to play for a long time to be able to play like yourself."
Miles Davis

"The great Henry Aaron hit a home run 755 times in his career, but failed to do so almost 12,000 times."
John Szarkowski on Garry Winogrand

"If you don’t ever make mistakes, you’re not trying. You’re not playing at the edge of your ability."
Artie Shaw

"I always include Luck in the budget."
Eliot Erwitt

"You mustn't want. You must be receptive."
Henri Cartier Bresson

"Me, I do not try to understand. For me, the most beautiful thing is to wake up, to go out, and to look. At everything. Without anyone telling me "You should look at this or that." I look at everything and I try to find what interests me, because when I set out, I don't yet know what will interest me."
Josef Koudelka

On Dialogue

"Having an opinion is part of your social contract with readers."
Peter Schjeldahl

"Like people and let them know it."
Robert Capa

"you know, the photographs . . . are more a question than a reply."
Sebastião Salgado